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Sunday, May 6, 2012

And What About Me? Without Entitlement And Self Esteem There Is No Love And Respect

When I was married
I had no love and respect.At first I accepted
it, but gradually I started asking the question “and what about me?”It got unbearable and I knew something had to
change. I thought I only had three
choices.Stay and make excuses for him, blame
and trash him and do that as a lifestyle, or leave.In other words, make it all about him.

I learned
pretty quickly that excuses don’t work, and also that blaming and trashing as a
lifestyle, believing that everything is men’s fault, didn’t work either.Blaming is a great tool while I’m having a
rant.I give myself total freedom to be
uncensored in my badness, my bitchiness.It’s a good way of getting that trapped energy out of my body.

But I couldn’t
stay there, because it took the focus away from me and it didn’t change my
partner.While I was pointing the finger
at somebody else I wasn’t paying attention to myself and what I needed.So actually it became just another form of
the elastic syndrome.

Once the
blaming / trashing session was over and I was actually interacting with
whatever partner I had, I rubber-banded back to pre-Victorian ways of
responding to life in the same way that disempowered women in love do, no matter how advanced and
intelligent my understanding was.

So I chose
number three.I left.But I wasn’t doing any work on myself.I didn’t know I had to, I wasn’t conscious of
my entitlement and self esteem, or that I couldn’t be real.So I found another man just the same as the
one I’d left.At first I didn’t realize
it; I believed everything was going to be fine now.

But of
course it wasn’t, because I wasn’t drawn to these kinds of men by chance, it
was something in me that landed me there every time.Having exhausted my three choices I realized
that, annoying and challenging as it was, my enemy was within.

I had to make
a fourth choice – to face the truth that it was scary for me to be real, that
my entitlement and self esteem were lousy, and that I didn’t believe I deserved
love and respect.I had to acknowledge
that I could only change myself, I couldn’t change anybody else. Women in love are notoriously bad at making this fourth choice!

I had to
build my entitlement and self esteem, and for that to happen I had to stop
looking at my partners. I had to really
look at me, see what I had, what I didn’t have, what I could and couldn’t do,
and what I needed so that I could be complete, empowered and strong within
myself.So that I could learn to be real
and get love and respect.